I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town’s Latin school.
I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray that finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.
My resolve to die was not the whim of an hour. It was the ripe, sound fruit that had slowly grown to full size, lightly rocked by the winds of fate whose next breath would bring it to the ground.
At that time two opposing concepts of the Game called forth commentary and discussion. The foremost players distinguished two principal types of Game, the formal and the psychological.
This happiness consisted of nothing else but the harmony of the few things around me with my own existence, a feeling of contentment and well-being that needed no changes and no intensification.
Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.
The world, as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish – and it will.
But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.
Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.
The best weapons against the infamies of life are courage, wilfulness and patience. Courage strenthens, wilfulness is fun and patience provides tranquility.
During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present, and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman.
In the beginning was the myth.
Age is a state of mind. Youth and age exist only among the ordinary people. All the more talented and exceptional of us; are sometimes old, just as we are sometimes happy, and sometimes sad.
Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone.
All men of goodwill have this in common – that our works put us to shame.
We create gods and struggle with them, and they bless us.
You must find your dream, then the way becomes easy.
If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.
It was still quiet in the house, and not a sound was heard from outside, either. Were it not for this silence, my reverie would probably have been disrupted by reminders of daily duties, of getting up and going to school.
What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world.
The tree does not die, it waits.